Xolile Maliti, a former driver, bulldozed his way past attempts by onlookers to extract pompous comments last week when he became the first HIV-positive patient to receive medicine in the long-awaited national roll-out of anti-retrovirals.
He steered straight to the core of the matter: ”It will let me live longer,” said Maliti (57), a resident of Langa, Cape Town. ”When I heard about the medicine, I started walking again. I was feeling alive.”
For hundreds of thousands of other South Africans awaiting the life-extending medicine, there are still mountains of bureaucracy and practical problems to dig through before the roll-out is a reality. April or May — a half year after the government’s announcement — is mentioned as the earliest possible date for the start of a large-scale programme.
But this week’s medicine for Maliti was proof that things can happen faster with the right combination of determination and funding. Maliti is one of the patients in a programme in Langa run by the Cape Town municipality, the Western Cape provincial government and ARK, a British-funded NGO led locally by Dr Ashraf Grimwood.
Grimwood was part of the task team that wrote the national treatment plan passed by the government in November. Thanks to foreign funding and eagerness from the local authority, he has been able to steam ahead with implementation and test drive many of the recommendations in the national plan.
While other organisations such as MÃ